The Obesity Era

We're actually arguing about system boundaries now. In my experience, all arguments about the causes of overweight and obesity wind up as boundary disputes.

> People who are obese tend to be that way because their automatic system wants to keep them that way.

As a nitpick, people frequently read homeostasis backwards. While the body's systems can be characterised as a control system with some central governor pulling levers to keep it within certain boundaries, that's not really what happens. This appearance is actually an emergent phenomenon of interacting feedback loops. X goes down, so Y goes up. Y goes up, Z goes up. Z goes up, X goes up. X goes up, Y goes down ... and so on. Equilibrium is maintained in the long run by the summative effect of counter-acting reactions and feedback loops.

Set point theory is basically a way of saying that different folks have different appetites. When they eat ad libitum, some people eat more, some less. Their weight converges to the asymptote of TDEE that balances their diet and the increased BMR from additional weight.

This not news. The point though is that consciousness and self-awareness allows us to examine our actions and modify them. But first you must internalise the locus of control. You either accept that you are the only person who can control your weight, or you don't. Oprah is a perfect example, because by hiring trainers and cooks and so on, she can externalise control. It stops working when she gets bored and fires them. Or when she reaches her "goal weight" and, not realising that it needs to be a permanent change in behaviour, fires them.

The final problem with set-point theory is that it doesn't explain why there has been a sudden burst in overweight and obesity in the past few years in rich countries only. Calories consumed per capita does; so does the steady deflation of the rate calories-per-dollar exchange. People's appetites haven't changed. People probably always wanted the salty, fatty, sugary things. It's just that now is the first time in history that it has been massively abundant and cheap in wealthy societies.

> But the studies that run long enough do see the weight come back. Almost everyone gets the weight back, from every diet.

It's a common truism to say that "the weight comes back", and yet actually, that claim is not really supported either. The literature on long-term compliance is sparse and I suspect the waters muddied because when you perform a medically supervised diet, again the locus of control is external. HAES advocates rely on a single study performed in 1959. A single study.

The term used these days is "adaptive thermogenesis". You can browbeat it anyhow by sufficiently undercutting caloric intake that the body can't down-regulate enough to cover the deficit. A much safer and easier way to do it is either to use a moderate deficit (studies of athletes show that with identical exercise and identical protein intake, athletes on a 500kcal deficit retain more strength and lean mass than athletes on a 1000kcal deficit) and do exercise, at least some of it with weights.

There's also the "rebound effect", which the Minnesota Starvation Experiment gives us insight into.

People stop dieting and then resume ad libitum eating. They gain fat faster than lean tissue, because gaining fat is easier than gaining lean tissue. Net effect: BF% worsens compared to baseline.

The key is not that "diets don't work, look, they make you fatter"; rather, it's that people see diets as something you do once and then stop. What's actually necessary is ongoing control of food intake.

You have an odd way of looking at things. ;) I happen to find the whole thing pretty amazing, the universe is beginning to understand itself.

Not to mention elegant in the way the human body runs perfectly on early-human food.

I'm not obese, and when eating sugar/starch I end up sleepy at times and starving a few hours later. Everyone knows it... moms have been telling us for decades if not centuries, not to give sugar to children.

Proteins/fats must be converted, meaning their glycemic index will be much lower. As such, a day or two after I substituted green-veggies & nuts for grains the difference was palpable.

I have not been stuffed or starving for over a month, lost my spare tire, and am loving it. Fits perfectly with everything I learned in chem, bio, and nutrition at uni. long before this became a movement. I don't think of this as FSM, rather differential equations such as these: http://17calculus.com/calc08-app-ccfluids.php

There are benefits to keeping blood sugar levels stable whether people want to believe it or not.